Software Engineering Director: Fulfilment

Takealot Group, South Africa’s leading online retailer, is looking for a seasoned Software Engineering Director: Fulfilment to join the Group’s senior technical leadership team.

We are a young, dynamic, hyper-growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us! 

Think you’ve been challenged before? Think again!

• Scale: 4 million happy shoppers shop online on takealot.com. Show them what you can do.
• Learn: We work with the best of the best, and then some. Code alongside industry leaders and upskill in record time. 
• Grow: Expand your career in the fast-growing Takealot Group: takealot.com and Mr D. We like to promote from within: Here’s your chance.

Who’s who in the tech space

This position reports to the Senior Director of Group Fulfillment. Peers include the Director of Logistics, Directors of Supply Chain, Senior Operations Management, Senior QA Leadership, and Principal Engineering for Group Fulfilment. 

This role will oversee the three engineering teams responsible for the maintenance and ongoing development of Takealot Group’s fulfilment systems. This person is ultimately responsible for the systems that ensure the orchestration between our warehousing (WMS) and logistics (Routing and Courier Allocation) systems. This area is also responsible for Takealot Fulfillment Solutions (TFS) client onboarding and management. It is the ideal role for someone to sit between operations and the customer.  The role will be responsible for driving the division’s technical strategy to both innovate and manage risks spanning efficiency, scalability, security, performance, and uptime.

You are a technology leader who thrives in a vibrant, innovative, and collaborative environment, and who has the passion and desire to remain hands-on in a fast-paced, dynamic space. You provide leadership and direction for teams across functional areas, also developing and implementing the strategy for these functional area/s. The Engineering Director, in conjunction with the Senior Director of Group Fulfillment, is responsible for developing and sustaining a healthy engineering organization, ensuring guidance on strategic and tactical technology choices, and ensuring consistent delivery of value to both internal and external customers. You are operations-centric, a self-starter, and enjoy working in an environment that requires strong technical ability, strong ownership, and great communication skills.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

Leadership

• Enable and empower the engineering managers and/or senior engineering resources in your division to drive technical innovation, vision, and strategy
• Lead by example: Follow best practices, promote process, foster respectful relationships with your peers and reports
• Quality and efficiency: Empower your teams to build the highest quality systems in an efficient and scalable manner. 

Team Management

• Define hiring objectives to meet business goals and support recruitment efforts by following and improving recruitment tools and processes
• Build and retain multiple high-caliber engineering teams in support of your technology and product domain
• Adapt team structures to support organizational needs
• Ensure a culture of safety, collaboration, trust, and respect within your division and across the organization
• Help your division's teams achieve their goals by removing roadblocks and interruptions
• Develop and monitor Key Performance Indicators for your division
• Identify and resolve sources of friction and conflict across the organization
• Facilitate discussions and workshops to move teams forward
• Promote the achievements of others across the organization
• Ensure consistent high-quality of deliverables
• Look for and implement opportunities for efficiency multiplication where possible

People Management

• Build relationships through regular one-on-one conversations
• Maintain depth of oversight through skip-level one-on-one conversations
• Support career development of engineers and managers according to defined frameworks
• Ensure teams are suitably trained to perform all job functions
• Provide coaching, guidance, and upskilling to team members
• Manage individual performance through reviews and feedback
• Address underperformance through improvement programs
• Administration of leave and other requests
• Onboarding for new team members
• Interview candidates for technical and cultural fit within the organization

Systems Oversight

• Stay up to date with industry trends and standards
• Present practical input for strategic technology decisions
• Support and give direction to innovation in your teams
• Maintain architectural oversight, building out a long-term roadmap to address risks and opportunities in your teams
• Accountable for the scale, reliability, efficiency, performance, security, and quality of the systems owned by your teams
• Skill up on core technologies used within engineering
• Ensure technical best practices and directives are adhered to in the teams

Project Delivery

• Relate business & technical objectives and requirements to actionable work
• Lead and/or delegate the agile processes within the team (standups, grooming, sprint planning, etc.)
• Lead projects, or delegate project leadership with oversight
• Accountable for meeting the team's project delivery expectations

Process & Operations

• Ensure teams adhere to existing engineering processes
• Develop new or evolve existing processes to improve efficiency, visibility, or output for your teams.
• Drive a culture of operational excellence and ownership
• Ensure adherence to best practices around incident response and change management
• Manage risk actively, addressing needs around security, maintenance, scale, and reliability in your teams
• Monitor and maintain the budget for systems owned by your team
• Monitor and maintain the budget for general team expenses (travel, social, etc.)
• Monitor and support the operational efficiency of the warehouses
• Minimise operational overheads which can slow down the development of new systems. 
• Ensure the team's KPIs and operational health telemetry is up-to-date and visible

Communication

• Contribute to internal engineering-related documentation
• Establish and/or maintain relationships with business partners and stakeholders
• Ensure your teams are aware of the North Star Metric and its Input Metrics that they are influencing with the projects they deliver
• Evangelize and reinforce the adoption of engineering best practices across your division

Qualifications & Experience:

• Bachelor's Degree or Advanced Diploma in IT, Engineering, or any related area of study or equivalent experience
• At least 10 years of experience, of which 5 years should be experience managing engineering teams. 
• Experience managing strategic technology roadmaps with customer focus
• Experience with building RESTful API web services and microservices
• Experience with relational databases
• Experience with event-driven systems
• Significant technical experience and a proven track record of architectural ownership and understanding
• A thorough understanding of computer science fundamentals, including object-oriented design, data structures, and algorithms 
• Experience in developing distributed, high-transactional and available systems
• Experience in supply chain and/or logistics would be advantageous, but not necessary

The skills we need:

• Excellent leadership and interpersonal skills
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Outstanding analysis and problem-solving abilities
• Collaborative team working skills and expertise to achieve business goals, and build cohesiveness while valuing individual perspective and contributions

Like what you see? 

If you meet the above you are an Extraordinary Mind. Apply today!!

Takealot is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants from previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities will be given preference.